Soul retrieval counselling outline
By Rowland Barkley, 1994

This course has now been replaced by "Holgraphic Timeline Training: Soul Integration for Therapists", but still has much useful background information for Archetype Negotiation students.

Overview
Soul retrieval Counselling is a method in which key fixed patterns of a client's life can be reworked. This involves three foci:

1. Holographic Timeline Clearing to relieve the key traumas of the client's life by understanding the events as a mutual creation.
2. Reworking the patterns to heal the energy field of the body.
3. Inviting soul or essence of the person that left to avoid trauma to return and participate in life, the integration having been honored and invoked by the clearing and reworking steps.

Presuppositions of Soul Retrieval Counselling

1. When part of you avoids life or leaves, a void is created that will constantly attract something to fill it.
2. It is never too late to have a happy childhood.
3. When you are whole, nothing can touch you.

History
Soul Retrieval has been a powerful technique for thousands of years. Native tribes basically use it in an emergency, e.g. somebody goes into a coma. A child almost dies and they'll have a tent full of children wailing for him/her to come back, inviting the soul to return to the body. As a technique used so "civilized" people can be more present, in order to live a more integrated life as people, it has only recently been well known.

I started researching the subject in earnest around six years ago. I had names such as "fragments", or "aspects", a term taken from the work of Jane Roberts. The methods I first developed were less effective due to the models I was using: mental concepts such as time and space, position in relation to the body, why did you split off. Those all return mind or attention units, but are not reliable in returning your ability to feel. A lost soul part believes it is the person, so one must ask it only questions that would invite integration, rather than questions that would evaluate separation.

Two years ago I apprenticed with the Soul Retrieval methods of Sandra Ingerman, who teaches with the anthropologist/shaman Michael Harner. The method she teaches involves lying on the floor next to the client, you journey in an altered state of consciousness brought about by monotonous drumming, and you find the soul part according to its own reality as to where it is, and with permission you bring it back into "ordinary" or consensus reality, and blow it back into the client's body. You briefly describe what you saw and the emotion and age that the lost soul felt it was when lost. Then the client spends perhaps 3-4 weeks integrating. This can be an emotionally dramatic phase, as memories of the trauma that caused the soul part to leave tend to return with the soul part, and this can take a period of weeks where supportive friends are needed.

A lack of childhood memory is a sure sign a soul part is gone. This is very common on this planet, as non-tribal societies tend to be out of touch to the feelings of the developing child, especially in the name of education. The soul part returns and the memories return with it. There can be quite some emotional pain during the integration period, as some definite ability to feel returns with each soul part. Things the client couldn't feel before have now come to the surface.

Soul parts are found in poetic rather than physical spaces, which cannot be reliably found by mechanistic means. Clearing techniques used to the end of time will never get to these as they are too complicated. During Sandra's training it became simple to track with and find a soul, even if it were in an improbable sounding space, such as hiding in a cake in a cave inside a mountain in Fairyland.

I have a huge respect for Sandra's technique and acknowledge her as the person who has made soul retrieval available so that any person who is as fragmented as you might need to be to arrive on this planet can be more present as a person.

My training with Sandra included some exercises that were a whole lot of fun. Some involved Sandra and Michael beating drums for 20 minutes, and half the students hide in non-ordinary or shamanic reality, e.g. in a bowl in a box in a cave at the end of a rainbow, and the other half have to track and find them.

In the process of a few days of exercises we learnt to track and find soul parts and deal with this whole thing gently. Soul parts are handled by very gentle invitation and negotiation. You could snatch a soul part back to consensus reality and abruptly blow it into somebody's body, but it won't stay.

Monotonous drumming as used by many 'primitive' tribes facilitates the shift of consciousness, and once one starts feeling the way rather than thinking, it is actually rather nice. With a male and a female drumming together, you can often start shifting consciousness within 20 seconds. No one needs drugs to learn to shift consciousness when there are two people drumming.

The bottom line question to the client is "How would your life have to change for you to be present and honor the qualities of this part of yourself?" If a person lost a major part of himself at the age of 3 months, and wanted to continue to look at life in the same old way, and not change any habits, that part won't return. Babies look at things very differently and newly, and most adults have lost that. Two years before the "Child Within" became such a popular concept for New Age workshops, I knew it would be popular, and thought I'd be able to get in on the act, but I just couldn't spot what I didn't know about it. This was that the child almost always isn't within, it's normally out, lost in space somewhere. Quite often after a Soul Retrieval, a person now can make sense of those workshops. "Now that I'm here, I can use this data."

Some people have wanted a more "scientific" sounding term than "Soul Retrieval". You could effectively use an alternate poetic term, but no mechanistic term will work for anything more than getting bits of mind or energy back. These return of their own accord after effective Soul retrieval. You could alternatively waste years finding attention units you have left behind in various universes. If YOU are here, you attract what is yours like a magnet.

Soul Retrieval Counseling
In Soul Retrieval Counselling, the principles of Soul Retrieval are integrated with clearing techniques. People can have had a lot of counselling, without ever having had a session where a real person has gently touched them, and really asked them what they really want to say. So rarely have there been sessions in which two beings were really there, in touch with each other, that you normally discover a lot of submerged childhood emotion in your client.

The main technique to release charge in Soul Retrieval Counselling sessions I use is called Holographic Timeline Clearing. I developed it out of an ancient and traditionally secret shamanic method. I don't personally believe that it is common for another person to be the uninvited cause of oneself being a victim, therefore I do not use counselling commands that evaluate this to the client, such as "Locate an incident of another causing you a heartache". This type of command implies that the client is at effect. When they realize they are not at effect, they are clear of the charge that can be accessed by this limited focus, and announce they are "clear" of incidents. The viewpoint of "others" are no less real nor accessible to run than the viewpoint of one's own.

It could be quite exciting for a client to run an incident such as a bull goring him in the stomach in a past life, and can even give some relief with stomach pains. The client can, however create the pain again if he hasn't confronted the incident as the bull experienced it. The bull might actually have enjoyed the incident, with a nice little energy hit. The client's unwillingness to experience this other view means he will continue to create a hologram of it forever. If you have ever cleared an incident and it comes up again, it's an unhandled viewpoint.

The addition of soul retrieval to clearing will not make the clearing process take longer. The main factors determining speed of result in clearing are clarity of the counselor, and the presence and attention of the client. A client with soul parts left around the universe can progress slowly. When you run a traumatic incident from multiple perspectives, soul parts may well integrate spontaneously, but often don't. The very gentle question "At that time, did part of you leave?", followed by a very gentle invitation to re-integrate may be all you need to add to your bag of clearing tricks to multiply your client's gain tenfold.

I used to struggle with the reality model of lost soulparts, as the concept of lost parts of a person out there was a little mentally jarring. It didn't seem to make sense, yet it worked so powerfully. My main consideration on this now is that soul is poetry, and poetry doesn't need to make sense. You help integrate soul parts using the reality of soul parts, and their reality is that they are the age they think they still are, with the emotion they are sitting in, and located in whatever they see they are located in. A mental approach will only recover mental attention units, but a poetic approach can integrate the being so that it naturally attracts the rest of itself without having to get mental.

I once saw two psychologists at a workshop nearly fall out of their chairs when I described a situation as "soul theft". They tried to correct the term to their wonderfully mechanistic model involving the person's parents not allowing him to experience something so parts of his personality became compartmented. I had to express that their explanation makes a lot more sense to my intellectual mind than my explanation, but they had seen that the poetic description had led to a life transformative integration, and that their "scientific" description had simply led to intellectual dialogue.

You don't receive soul retrieval as a hobby, scoring how many parts you can find. Commonly you want only to work with a couple of major parts that polarize the being. Some other time in your life when what was already found has been well integrated, perhaps months later you might need perhaps one more session to find another soul part.

One experience that led me to focus on such areas as Soul Retrieval was the shocking realization that only spiritual awareness that you experience in body can be taken with you beyond death. Many of us have been sold the opposite model, that by moving out of the body and doing a set of wonderful exercises is the "real thing" on the path to immortality. Out of body exercises can be done between lives, but only what you experience in body as a collected integrated being can be taken with you to another body.

High Level Integration
Each of us at a high level may well be immortal, inviolable, and unfragmentable. At such a level one would be already liberated, which has nothing at all to do with the need to have clearing sessions at the human level. Soul retrieval as discussed here does not usually even concern a very high level of consciousness. It concerns your capacity to feel and create as a human being; only applying to those levels of consciousness which respond to your present life name. Above soul retrieval is the sacred and secret subject of Essence Retrieval, which is a special subject of its own as it is important not to bring back old patterns and pictures from past lives.

The most important basic in spiritual development is wholeness at "lower" or human levels. Without that wholeness, there is a constant void waiting to be filled by something, so no spiritual work at "higher" levels will shine through cleanly. People won't see where you're at. There is so much more warmth in the face and sparkle in the eyes of a person who has most of their soul present.

Do we need to define the term "soul"? I use the term "soul" because it tends to defy technical definition, and therefore permits the client to reach from the term in a poetic manner to whatever sense of creative or emotive missingness that they may have, and look at inviting that void to be filled by Self. The definition of "soul" I use to satisfy my analytical mind's need to classify everything is this: "The feeling capacity of the person up to as high a level of consciousness as relates to the client's present life name." If your name is "Millicent", soul would be the feeling component of "Millicent", not you as an immortal.

Some soul parts are electrical energies that belong specifically to the body and could be called "somatic soul", and some are energies that relate to the slower or more material frequencies of the being. It is not often necessary to specify what sort of soul one is dealing with. The need of the analytical mind to carefully classify and explain everything according to its own limited rules may well be an important causative factor in modern societies being so soulless. It is so easy to come up with a set of "whiz bang" sounding definitions that appeal to the ego that it is extremely easy to create an ego-boosting cult.

Such techniques are often valuable, but the results available are tightly limited by the jargon or definitions of the cult, as the client is not free to focus outside of the definitions. Where definitions are vital is where charge cannot be released due to concepts being overlaid on each other. Holographic Timeline Clearing is usually vital to release traumatic charge so the body's electrical field can accept the soul part. This technique allows the incident to be inspected one aspect at a time, when actually an incident is a hologram that ideally should be understood as a whole. It isn't practical to expect a client to do this all at once, so defining the incident into parts is often-times a necessary precursor to understanding the whole.

Soul work, being at a slower frequency of vibration than the immortal aspects of the being, hasn't been emphasized in most spiritual practices. The slower frequencies are what makes you feel warm with someone, or feel like purring like a cat, the light sparkle in the eyes, the feeling that someone is "there" for you.

This dichotomy between levels is in the process of dissolving, and there is a new phase of human evolution in process, in which it will become usual to retain immortal consciousness simultaneously with human feelings and the intellectual thought processes that amuse the mind. You don't need to shift down in frequency to do soul work, you just include lower harmonics of the client's "spiritual signature", that essence that identifies them as unique, and aim for an integration of "levels" such that the concept of levels melts. A whole person can be thought of as a hologram in the sense that each part contains the whole. Each cell, both physical and spiritual contains the codes that produce the whole.

Stable Soul retrieval often requires some form of another shamanic practice called "Power Animal Retrieval" The human body is weak if it is not in resonance with the other life-forms on the planet. If "horse" were the form you needed to perform your current chosen activity, you would not tune in with "a horse" but "Horse", the essence of that class of animals. You can reach out to a class of animals, and allow your body to resonate in harmony with it. Chronic disease is commonly lack of this vital resonance. Honoring these essences in little ways, like enjoying animal dances can dramatically aid the health of the human body.

When doing a soul retrieval for a special occasion such as somebody's birthday, I am inclined to use full shamanic ceremony. I have two drummers drumming away, and I journey into non-ordinary reality (which I am beginning to think of as the Real World). Done as Soul Retrieval Counselling, the aim is to achieve maximum client participation, guiding them gently to find their own soul parts, and inspect the trauma that caused the soul part to leave. The latter reduces the duration of each emotional shift that inevitably occur during the few weeks integration period. There probably isn't nor need to be a method of waking up decades of suppressed emotions without a number of ups and downs, a little joy here, and a little hysterical crying there. If the incident hasn't been relieved first, the memories will return with the soul part, and the integration will occur, but be rougher than necessary.

Incident Clearing as has commonly been practiced has cleared the pictures of the incidents, but left many uninspected feelings. This is changing rapidly as clearing practitioners who have their own soul retrieved can feel it quite plainly when the feeling part of an incident is still there. Many may be able to integrate soul retrieval without often asking different questions than before; it will become natural to ask counseling questions with feeling instead of power. The days of "I can't see this incident, so it has been cleared" will hopefully be soon over. There is no value whatsoever in just clearing a picture, as the picture is the usual method of filing an incident, which allows one to trace down the encysted feeling.

The cause of not remembering incidents is soul loss. The soul part has left with the memory. One advantage of a shamanic soul retrieval is that the person is present with their memories so that clearing can be possible. You can't get dogmatic about sequence on this. If there is not enough person present to make good fast gains, invite them to be present first, then relieve the trauma. Life repair has almost never produced the result that the person feels that their life has been repaired, as the childhood soul has usually left with the childhood memories, so they never can get cleared. Then the client and clearing practitioner both look to "higher levels" for the cause of case instability. This can get never-ending and confusing, as the client can only rest in a level of consciousness at which they are already clear, but meanwhile, back on Earth, nothing has been handled.

The way I have developed Soul Retrieval Counselling is artistically a dance between clearing, and inviting Presence. Bring back the child soul, then clear the childhood memories. Alternatively, clear the traumatic incidents so they are not a negative resonance that prevents the soul part from being willing or able to return. Ideally you would weave an artistic balance between erasing the pictures, experiencing the feelings, and inviting Presence.

One exciting aspect of Soul Retrieval Counseling could be summed up as this phrase: "Real men cry at the movies." You will commonly find clients who have had extensive clearing from a mental viewpoint, and yet one extremely gentle question asked with feeling will open all the feeling that could be accessed with "technoclearing", and all their levels, certificates and status fall in the dust. It takes real courage for a client to drop the "I am God" game, and start afresh at a genuine beginning. Once you finally get used to living in the present with your feelings, child and adult, it's kind of nice being alive.

The real power of traumatic incident clearing done right is not that a memory is erased, it is not that charge is gone from the being. While truth concerning incidents is clarified, it in fact it matters little whether the incident run is present life, past life, or imaginary. What matters is entirely that what is run parallels a "glitch" or solidity in the body's electrical field to the degree that the field is simultaneously healed. That alone allows other people to see you as you are, and your soul to resonate with your body and shine through, and the body's energy field to act as a resonating device to focus the being cleanly into this reality. Then you can operate in the Real World, instead of merely in Consensus Reality. The Real World is hardly seen, and it is right here.

Copyright (c) 1994 Rowland Barkley